In this collection of recent film work by North Carolina-based media artists Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat, celluloid film serves as both a material register and critical resource for interrogating the documentary image. Whether using discontinuous montage, handmade techniques for creating and processing images, or dramatic re-enactors, these five short films aim to extend the formal possibilities of non-fiction filmmaking as Brown and Gruffat attempt to describe and decipher life in the American South.

Sabine Gruffat is a digital media artist and filmmaker with a special interest in the social and political implications of media and technology. Her experimental and essay films explore how technology, globalization, urbanism, and capitalism affect human beings and the environment. Sabines films have screened at festivals worldwide including the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, and CPH:DOX. Sabine lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Bill Brown is a media artist interested in ways landscape is interpreted, appropriated, and reconfigured according to human desires, memories, and dreams. His research interests include haunted houses, UFOs, memorial architecture, and outsider archaeology. Bills films have screened at venues around the world, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Lincoln Center. A retrospective of his films was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bill lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.